Nvidia announces five 40nm GeForce 200M GPUs

Nvidia has announced five new mainstream GeForce 200M series GPUs this afternoon and all are based on TSMC's 40nm process, adding support for DirectX 10.1 and GDDR5 - two firsts for Nvidia's products.

The company's previous GeForce 200M products were, in fact, based on the older 55nm G92 GPU which has found its way into many of Nvidia's desktop products in the past 18 months and are derived from the two and a half year-old G80 architecture.

These latest mobile products have the underpinnings of the company's GT200 GPU which is featured in the GeForce GTX 200 series desktop cards, but they're targeted at more mainstream audiences.

The GeForce G210M is the lowest end part, which features just 16 stream processors running at 1,500MHz and a 64-bit memory interface. The G210M has a thermal design power of just 14W and its core operates at 625MHz, while the 512MB of GDDR3 memory hums along at 1,600MHz (effective).

Next up are two fairly similar parts, the GeForce GT 230M and GT 240M, which both feature 48 stream processors running at 1,100MHz and 1,210MHz respectively. Core clocks are 500MHz and 550MHz respectively and both have a 23W TDP. They also both feature 1GB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 1,600MHz (effective) on a 128-bit memory interface.

The GeForce GTS 250M and GTS 260M are also fairly similar parts, as both have 96 stream processors; they're clocked at 1,250MHz and 1,375MHz respectively. Unlike the GT 230M and GT 240M parts, there's a 10W difference in thermal design power - the GTS 250M is rated at 28W, while the GTS 260M's TDP is 38W.

Nvidia has set the GTS 250M's core speed at 500MHz, just like the GT 230M, while the GTS 260M's core clock replicates the GT 240M's at 550MHz. These parts, however, are the first Nvidia GPUs to support GDDR5 memory - there's 1GB of it on board connected via a 128-bit memory interface. It runs at 3,200MHz on the GTS 250M and at 3,600MHz on the GTS 260M.

The company said that it has made "adjustments in the micro-architecture to improve battery life and overall graphics performance compared to the previous generation." It claims the architectural improvements actually make the GTS 260M almost as fast as the GeForce GTX 260M, despite having fewer stream processors that run at the same frequency and a smaller memory bus width. Of course, the introduction of GDDR5 is undoubtedly going to make up for a lot of the deficit associated with the smaller memory bus width, but it's not going to make up for the shader unit deficit.

Nvidia said that we can expect to see these new GPUs in "over 100" notebook designs by the end of the year and when asked about the reported problems with TSMC's 40nm process, the company said it had encountered no such issues. "We're using around 80 per cent of TSMC's 40nm capacity," a spokesperson claimed.